THREE YEARS OUT OF FOUR

THREE YEARS OUT OF FOUR

Three years out of four, I’m a piano tuner

for the Julian calendar, gone like the extra day

of a leap year with nothing but time on my hands.

I’ve been seeking sanctuary among the stars

since I bought my first telescope as a boy,

and started working at leaving the earth,

but I haven’t found an embassy that will take me in.

So I languish in this self-imposed exile

holding long conversations with windows and lenses.

One day I’m Spinoza. And the next day, I’m Ovid.

When I’m not lying down like the threshold

of a humiliating synagogue, or grinding glass in a garret

in between bouts of philosophy, I’m polishing

the Tristes of my tears with bitter carborundum.

Jewelled perfection of cold Botticellian blue outside.

Ice placked snow drooping on the windowsills.

The greasy sidewalks lying in wait for hip transplants.

I don’t belong here as much as it seems anywhere else.

I’m holed up like the last of the Neanderthals in Gibraltar

with a bigger brain than I know what to do with,

looking for Venus above the decorative buttresses and rosettes

of the fieldstone rooftops in the sunset of my extinction.

Poor me, I mock myself, as a retort to self-pity.

Poor bears. Poor squirrels. Poor homeless cats.

Poor people on the street with happy faces for lifemasks

they wear like man hole covers over gutters of disappointment.

Busy chores I should be attending to like a good gene

labouring to insure and advance my survival,

but I’m close to despair and my heart lies heavy and idle

as a lunar hand-axe I flint knapped out of an eclipse

like a new moon chipped from obsidian. Shaky. Irritable. Unstable.

The winged quarter horses of my emotions

yoked to a death cart like breakers to a constellation

of dead sea stars. I’m trying to sow wildflower seeds

in the fissures of glacial earthquakes cracking like mirrors

but it’s the wrong time of year for anything to come up.

No faith. No dreams. No expectations. More of the same.

Dusty mobiles dripping with crystals against

a grimy windowpane with milky cataracts

letting less and less light in, diurnally, and the stars

smeared and smudged like the spider-mites of time

on the stalactite unicorns and sloppy, one-horned chandeliers

on the underside of my tears dying like unwatered plants.

But I’m trying. I’m attempting to shoulder

this heavy lift of a world like a rafter up over my head,

and if not a rafter in a sound house of the zodiac

with honourable foundation-stones quarried from cemeteries

that go back deep into the heritage past, then, at least

the keel of the moon passing over the Great Barrier Reef

I seem to have become like a fossilized spine of coral polyps

as brittle as the vertebrae of a lunar archipelago

of surviving dinosaurs huddled around their dying serpent fires

like the homeless around the mattresses and burning oildrums

under a highway exit ramp. Down, down, down, they

all go into the down like London bridge. And then

I remember the voice of an old Bodhidharma doll I met once

who was quadriplegic having lost his limbs meditating,

who said seven times down eight times up, such is life.

Such is life. But I’m punchy as a boxer who didn’t throw the fight.

Off road emotionally, I’m jacking up my drive wheel

to swing it out of this ditch and back on to the thoroughfare

I’ve salted like Carthage with kitty litter, ashes, and sand,

to keep on spinning my wheels, true to an illuminated way of life

on the greasy mirrors of an enlightened ice age. Hot damn.

Something to look forward to at last. Penquins in the Galapagos.

The smell of diesel narwhales and nuclear submarines in Frobisher Bay.

I’ve got to find higher ground than that to drain my grave

on this spiritual flood plain. I’ve got to screw a brighter lightbulb

into my housewell to keep it from freezing. I’ve got to grow

another layer of skin on the pearls of my nacreous mystics

beseeching shamanistic dolmens in the Arctic not to keep

their mouths shut about Silla, the indwelling spirit of life,

who says that you can trust the universe completely

in a voice so soft children aren’t afraid of it

though they’re often led astray out into the tundra.

Come dark. Bring me your stars like constellations

in the Burgess Shale of the night. Lift my seas up

into precipitous mountains riddled with subliminal secrets of starmud

that could pack these scars and cracks in my prophetic skull

with motherlodes of gold the way they do in Japan

to show respect for their broken tea cups as if somehow

to drink from the lips of the mended and restored made the tea

taste sweeter than Zen. I’m hanging this white flag of snow

out of my window, asking for a cease-fire and a truce,

and maybe if it isn’t over-reaching, a peace treaty

between who I am and who I am thinks I should have been.

I asked my cat to be my guru when I got to the point

I wanted to fling things around in a road rage of asteroids.

I wanted to go out in blaze of light like a comet from the Kuiper belt,

or a tantric boy with a matchbook in a fireworks factory

but my cat just looked at me with the first and last crescents

like parentheses around the black moon in her eyes

and said it’s up to you to fill in the blanks

of your own waxing and waning. And, of course, she’s right.

Who knows more about the ebb and neap of the tidal flows

and undertows of life, love, and light than a fully illuminated cat does?

PATRICK WHITE